När ens enda vän är en gnom : En undersökning om i vad mån socialtjänsten uppfattar ungdomars datorspelsmissbruk som ett socialt problem och hur de i så fall arbetar med det

Abstract Authors: Olov Eriksson and Martin Olofsson Title: When your only friend is a gnome - A study of how social services think of computer game addiction as a social problem and how they treat it [translated title] Supervisor: Gunilla Lindén Assessor: Kristina Göransson The purpose of this essay is to find out if the social services think of computer game addiction as a social problem through a professional perspective. We also wanted to find out how they treated the problem. To get this information we have done interviews with seven social workers. Through the comparison of their views on the problem with seven criteria’s that decides whether or not a problem is a social problem, our result shows that these seven social workers indeed sees computer game addiction as a social problem. We also came to see that they did not have any special treatments for this problem, they treat the problem as other social problems. This is probably because of the lack of scientific research done on the subject. Keywords: computer game addiction, social services, social problem, datorspelsberoende, socialtjänst, socialt problem